


Unity

by Niteflier



Category: Supreme Commander (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-16 22:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15447324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niteflier/pseuds/Niteflier
Summary: The Infinite War is over. The Seraphim have been driven back. Years of peace between the three factions have brought new synthesis and harmony to the galaxy. Human nature, however, is hard to break.Greed, lies, and betrayal threaten to shatter the brittle Coalition into a thousand tiny worlds in the black.Hannah Sureyn Reise, however, knows none of that. She's far more interested in finding out what her parents (And Uncle Will!) are secretly plotting.And by Harmony, she's going to find out!





	Unity

UNITY

Prologue: War Without End

3837 CE  
Unclaimed Territory  
Unexplored World: Antares VI  


Wraith clicked his tongue absently as one of his Spooks overflew a stealthed UEF forward base. It looked like Jonathan was aiming to attack one of his secondary economy bases. He absently tasked a squadron of Revenants and Gemini to take out the small base and turned back to the design document he was working on. He knew the UEF commander had a tendency to use his enemy’s (or his enemy’s enemy’s) tactics against them. He paused, then rolled his eyes. Then again, he had taken that base from Adel nearly intact, so it still had the gleaming white and green extractors and generators that displayed the ‘glory’ of the Illuminate.

He would have thought the other two commanders knew he could spoof their IFF by now. It had, after all, been nearly three months since the start of this three-way ‘battle’.

He, Operative 34f46544d414348494e45575241495448474c49444554484f5547485453, Crusader Adel Havos, and Major Jonathan Reise had all arrived here, on the planet designated Antares VI with orders to capture and secure the world as a ‘back end’ gate position. They each had been promised support in the form of Sub Commanders within seventy-two hours of gating in. They each had been told that this mission was critical to later success due expanding the Quantum Gate Network. They each had been sent off knowing they had the full backing of their command structure.

Less than thirty hours after arrival, all communications to the greater galaxy had been cut off.

They had all suspected the others, of course. By that point, each had built up a primary base, set up satellite bases, been driven off from their primary bases and had to start over, and so on and so forth. At that point, they each knew they needed help from home to win. He himself had just been finishing overseeing construction on a Summoner when whatever happened… happened.

From their perspective, the Gate Network crashed. No signal to or from the closest Gate, not even the `)ACCESS DENIED(` of a hard-locked Gate. None of them knew if the entire Network, or just the single Gate that they could reach from Antares were affected. All they had at that point were themselves, and their never-ending battle. The Infinite War in microsom.

Wraith shifted his eyes to the strategic panel, showing that the Revenants he had dispatched had obliterated Jonathan’s attack base without incident. He wondered absently if the Major was distracted by something when the alert pinged him. 

`“Message incoming on open channel,”` reported his ACU.

He rolled his eyes, wondering for the Nth time why he hadn’t just re-coded the software to not be annoying, and opened the short string.

“Bb6?” he murmured to himself. “Why does that seem familiar?” The familiar command to check his on-board databases - with the additional warning that there was no connection to the greater Cybran database - completed swiftly, and the answer made him wish he could throttle the other Commander.

Wraith activated his communications array and linked into the nearest Olympus, which scattered the origin point from his ACU a kilometer and a half under the acidic ocean of Antares VI to fifteen out of his sixty-three Omni towers. The open broadcast could be picked up by anyone with a compatible receiver within several light minutes. More than enough to reach its destination.

“Reise, how the hell do you know of a eighteen century old chess match, and how did you maneuver me into playing Deep Blue?” he added a scowl to his aggravated voice, knowing that it was the best he could do to show his displeasure.

As soon as his system started on the standard warning, he bypassed it and threw the received broadcast up on his primary screen. The new video showed a grinning, blond man clad in a blue skinsuit sitting in a command chair not so different from his own. “What’s that Wraith? Are you complaining about a game that Kasparov _lost_?” The UEF Commander spread his arms wide, “Really, you should be thanking me! You’re still, what, seven, eight games on me?” he folded his hands behind his head.

“It's not so much you giving me the game as that--” Wraith shook his head. “No, strike that, it _is_ the fact that the original game would have me win. You would have thrown a curve at me somewhere down the line. Probably around 31.g3. You are too damned sneaky like that”

The other man’s grin widens farther, as if to prove the point. “Actually, it was going to be 32.Re8.”

Wraith sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Of course. Kasparov’s original mistake. Were you planning on me figuring this out at that point, or were you just going to watch me fumble as I followed the original match?”

Before Jonathan could answer, another alert sounded, both on the video and his panel. Almost as soon as he could silence it, another screen opened, and shoved Reise’s to the side. The new broadcast showed a beautiful auburn haired woman dressed in a light green and white skinsuit, glaring at them both. “Are you two really arguing over a chess match that happened, from the sounds of it, before humanity even left Earth? While we’re stuck here over five-hundred light-years from it?”

The blond man rolled his eyes, “But Honey! History is important! Y’know this is the best time we’ll have to go over everything we have, since none of us can just _leave._ ”

Wraith watched with schadenfreude as the woman reached over and stabbed a command into her console without her glare leaving the screen. His lips twitched into a smile as another alert strobed out of his unit’s speakers: `“Strategic Launch Detected.”`

Jonathan mock sighed, and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead. “Ah! Our love, doomed from the dawn! Why--”

`“Strate- Strate- Strate- Strategic Launch Detected.”`

Wraith was now chortling to himself at the other man’s shocked expression. “You really are trying to kill me aren’t you?” the UEF Commander stated.

Adel narrowed her eyes, “What do you think we’ve each been trying to do for the past three months?”

The symbiont sobered quickly at that. “Considering, Adel, that you’ve parked your ACU on top of a mountain sitting and staring to the north, I’ve buried myself under the ocean, and Jonathan’s disappeared so thoroughly that _none_ of my spyplanes can find him, we haven’t really been trying to kill each other since about day five of this fiasco.” Wraith shook his head at them both. “You know that the Major and I have been playing chess back and forth, both of us have listened to your nightly sermon-slash-prayers to The Way, and if I didn’t know better - _and I don’t_ \- the two of you have actually been _flirting_ with each other for the better part of five weeks.” He noticed that both of them were avoiding looking directly into their communication pickups. He drew in a deep breath, and let it out slowly, reminding himself that symbionts _did not get headaches_. “And he’s correct. I don’t have a working design for a Quantum Gate. That was supposed to be delivered with my support commanders. I bet neither of you do as well. We’re stuck here, playing out wargames and annoying each other to tears.”

Jonathan slouched down, his face losing all expression. “He’s right. I’ve got a partial Gate design, but I’m stuck with some of the fiddly bits of it. Neither he nor I can contact our superiors, either.” He raised his eyes to the screen. “I don’t suppose you’ve been able to contact the Illuminate?”

The Crusader pursed her lips and shook her head slightly. “You’ve actually been _listening_ to my meditations, haven’t you? But no, I don’t have the psychic reach to pass a coherent message, and all I’ve gotten from The Way is a general melange of emotions. Whatever happened to the Gate Network, it didn’t have enough emotional impact to make a difference.” She looked off to the side, at another screen. “Do you have Eliminators at all your bases, Jonathan?”

Reise gave a short laugh, “You keep sending me your love with nukes, Adel, and I’ll keep making sure I’ve got protection covered.”

Wraith reached up and massaged his right temple, absently wishing he could do the same for his cybernetic-covered left, and reminded himself again that _symbionts do not get headaches_. “So none of us know what’s going on elsewhere. None of us can contact our factions. None of us can get off this rock because we don’t have complete design schemata for a Transmitting Gate, just the ground based Gateways. Any other points that I may have missed?” He absently programmed in target coordinates and saw his energy economy dip into the negatives.

Adel shook her head. “I’ve had a Portal operational for weeks now, messages queued up to be sent as soon as it gets a valid connection to the Network. Nothing.”

The Cybran shifted his gaze over to the UEF Commander’s video, and saw Jonathan staring off into the distance. After a moment, he seemed to focus, and frowned slightly. “The first Quantum Gate went online about 2170 or thereabouts, right?”

Wraith looked over at Adel, and saw his confusion mirrored in her face. “Yes, the first Gate transit as we know them was between Sol and Alpha Centauri in 2172. By 2284 the sixteen Prime Worlds were all connected by the Network. This is literally ancient history, Reise.”

The other man had started to enter commands into his unit. Over the broadcast, Wraith heard several alert and warnings announce themselves before being cut off. Finally, Jonathan finished, and Wraith started as alerts started up in his own ACU. Cutting through them quickly, he found a design schemata for… the QGW R-32? _The UEF’s Quantum Gateway?_ He looked back up at the communication screen in shock, absently noting that Adel had the same look on her face.

Reise spread his hands, an uncommon serious look on his face. “I’ve been tearing the design schemata apart and trying new things out to see if I can get it to work as a Network Gate. But, I’ve hit blocks on nearly every tweak and tinker I can think of. The physical one I have can’t support the modifications I’ve done so far. However,” and here the spark of humor returned to his eye, “If our ancestors were able to figure this out over a millennia ago, we three, with three different design foci and three different viewpoints, should be able to fabricate something that isn’t a QGW R-32, or a Portal, or a Summoner, but something that can get us off this rock before we all go insane and really do kill each other.”

“And what then?” came the soft question from Adel. “We’d be branded as traitors just for talking like this, much less sharing schemata, or Seraphim forbid, uniting our different technologies. Having done this, we could never go home again.” 

“Fuck’em.” The short exhortation was a surprise to Wraith, especially as it came from his own mouth. He shook himself and continued. “Fuck the lot of them. We were here less than a week on our own, and we’d stopped trying to really kill each other. They all… Hell. Doctor Brackman has been at this for a thousand years. If they’ll brand us traitors because we work together, well.” He nodded, and saw the other two nod with him. “The Way says peace for all, right? We symbionts just want the freedom to live our lives. And the UEF want to rebuild the Empire. Well, Fuck them. Let’s show them that together, we can beat them all at their own damn game. United until the last.”


End file.
